1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of telephony communications including electronic messaging and pertains particularly to methods and apparatus for integrating short message services within a contact center routing environment.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
In the art of telephony communications, organizations selling products and service often utilize telecommunication contact center services for interacting with their customers. A state-of-art contact center can field communications incoming from a variety of disparate networks. Telephone calls incoming to a contact center access point, generally a CTI-enabled telephone switch or a switch implemented in software, may source from analog or digital networks. In addition to voice calls, which may include plain old telephone service (POTS) calls and data network telephony (DNT) calls, email routing systems are known to the inventors for fielding and internal routing of incoming email messages from customers.
Routing in a contact center is computer aided or more particularly, computer telephony integrated (CTI). Routing strategies are expressed as one or a series of routing objects that may be served upon request from a routing node. Access points to the center may include Web-based contact points for both voice calls and electronic messaging (email, instant message), as well as chat services. Therefore, a contact center presents multiple communication channels that reflect the various forms of communication and interaction available at the center.
Users are increasingly mobile in today's marketplace and are increasingly using wireless cellular telephones over land-line telephones to interact with businesses. A limited form of peer-to-peer messaging has been developed for wireless users termed short message services (SMS) in the art. SMS messaging is limited to a maximum number of characters and does not support multimedia attachments. However, Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS) is an extension of SMS that does support multimedia attachments. SMS is a peer-to-peer service that runs over short message peer-to-peer protocol (SMPP) or some proprietary version of the protocol dependant upon the service provider.
The popularity and use of SMS is growing and it has occurred to the inventors that it would be desirable for a state-of-art call center to be able to integrate short message service (SMS) messaging with various call center systems and applications. However, due to the session-less nature of SMS messaging over peer-to-peer protocol, the conventional means for routing interactions within a call center do not include support for SMS interaction between mobile users and call center systems or agents.
Therefore, what is clearly needed is a system for routing short message service (SMS) messages to endpoints in a contact center such that SMS interaction between mobile users and contact center resources can be conducted within the contact center environment.